CAN PRODUCTIVITY BE MEASURED IN LAW ENFORCEMENT WITHOUT CREATING QUOTAS?

By Trey Rusk

There are many variables in law enforcement, such as assigned district, shift, calls for service and the evaluator. One must also take into account the areas of evaluation. In the case of the number of criminal cases filed by an officer, are the cases broken down into physical arrests or citations? A felony case or a misdemeanor case? A juvenile case or an adult case? If they are, this is a mistake because a criminal case is a criminal case.

Measuring productivity in police work is hard to do. If the evaluator breaks down the productivity into too many categories the officer will have a difficult time achieving the supervisor’s goals or maybe without saying it. Quotas.

Thirty years ago as a new agent, the sergeant would tell me what he expected as far as productivity. He would say, “In the Houston District I expect four criminal cases and one administrative case a week”. Was this a quota? Yes and no. The sergeant knew the district, the case load per agent and the past productivity in Harris County. I didn’t consider it to be a quota. I was grateful for the honest answer. I also saw that I could easily trip over that number of cases a week. On undercover assignments, I could double or triple that number.

The buzz word “Quota” became known and lawsuits were filed. The wise sergeants were told not to specifically ask for numbers in productivity. This left officers in most departments with no definite answer. Theories and average calculations abounded from the department brass not just in TABC but statewide.

One of the worst productivity evaluating theories came out of this fear of the quotas. It was once lauded by upper management as the cure all to productivity evaluations. It was relatively simple. The sergeant was told to take the number of personnel; the number of cases made by category and through simple averaging, a line could be established. If an officer was below average in a certain category he or she would be given a low scoring evaluation. This could affect morale, merit raises, promotions or assignments.

The flaw of multi-category evaluating was that it creates an unreachable quota. Each officer then began trying to reach the last average in a single category. The problem with this type of productivity evaluation is that it always leaves someone behind and this cannot be fixed. It results in unchecked increasing productivity or what is known as a Case Race.

Case Races take away officer discretion. It can result in a department becoming known as a speed trap. It could also lead to shortcuts to achieve the set goals. Where once an officer might have issued a warning, now a citation is always written or the citizen is jailed for a minor violation to raise the productivity in the arrest category.

Can productivity be measured in law enforcement without creating quotas? Yes. Let the sergeants do their job. They know the shifts, districts, the cases assigned to each officer and what is going on in the field. It would benefit most departments if upper micro-managers and their theories would stay out of it.
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Trey Rusk served in the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission’s field operations division in several capacities, including administrative lieutenant in the Houston District, District Supervisor for the Rio Grande Valley and District Supervisor for Northeast Texas before retiring in 2005.